Bibliographic Essay
The importance of the word ‘civilisation’ was first highlighted by Lucien Febvre in 1930 and translated as ‘“Civilisation”: Evolution of a Word and a Group of Ideas’, in P. Burke (ed.), A New Kind of History: From the Writings of Febvre (London: Routledge, 1973).
The changing meaning of the word is discussed in O. Brunner, W. Conze and R. Koselleck (eds.), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, 8 vols. (Stuttgart: Klett Cotta, 1972-97), especially the chapters by M. Riedel, ‘Gesellschaft, Gemeinschaft’, and Jorg Fisch, ‘Zivilisation, Kultur’. The ‘civilising process’ is better served in English, although Nobert Elias’s two-volume The Civilizing Process did not appear in translation (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992) until half a century after its publication in German. In relation to his impact on the history of violence, there are two general surveys inspired by Elias’s fusion of Freud and Weber: R. Muchembled, A History of Violence (London: Polity Press, 2012) and S. Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature. Why Violence Has Declined (London: Allen Lane 2011). The homicide statistics supporting their case are found in M. Eisner, ‘Long-Term Trends in Violent Crime’, Crime and Justice: A Review of Research 30 (2003), 83-142.Critiques of the civilising thesis first appeared in German in the 1990s, but only Gerd Schwerhoff, ‘Criminalized Violence and the Process of Civilisation: A Reappraisal', Crime, Histoire, Societes 6 (2002), 103-26, has been translated. From an anglophone perspective, see J. Goody, The Theft of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), ch. 6; S. Carroll, Blood and Violence in Early Modern France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); and R. Roth, American Homicide (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). An important reinterpretation of the causes of interpersonal violence is R.
Gould, Collision of Wills: How Ambiguity about Social Rank Breeds Conflict (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). The most important rethinking of the early modern state, which demonstrates how state actions contributed to high rates of interpersonal violence, is W. Beik, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century France: State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). The theoretical debate is summarised by S. Carroll in ‘Thinking with Violence', History and Theory 56 (2017), 23-43.There is a large literature on civility. R. Chartier (ed.), A History of Private Life: Passions of the Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985) contains important surveys by Chartier and Revel, which rely heavily on French examples. A. Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), J. Bremmer and H. Roodenburg (eds.), A Cultural History of Gesture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991) and M. Peltonnen, The Duel in Early Modern England: Civility, Politeness and Honour (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) add nuance and complicate the claim that etiquette is necessarily a civiliser. On politeness, see P. Langford, ‘The Uses of Eighteenth-Century Politeness', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 12 (2002), 311-31. L Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) overestimates the originality of English thinking. There is no history, as yet, of the emergence of civil society, though D. Colas, Civil Society and Fanaticism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), S. Kaviraj and S. Khilnani (eds.), Civil Society: History and Possibilities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) and N. Terpstra and N. Eckstein (eds.), Sociability and Its Discontents: Civil Society, Society Capital, and Their Alternatives in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009) contain important insights.
The revolution in our understanding of the law can be traced, in its English variant, to the seminal collection by John Bossy (ed.), Disputes and Settlements (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), which continues to inspire imitators: see for example S. Cummins and L. Kounine (eds.), Cultures of Conflict Resolution in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 2015).